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Welcome to TotCare: Obama's Preschool Takeover
Townhall.com ^ | December 10, 2014 | Michelle Malkin

Posted on 12/09/2014 10:33:03 PM PST by bd476


Townhall

Welcome to TotCare: Obama's Preschool Takeover

Michelle Malkin | December 10, 2014

The wheels on the bus go 'round and 'round, just like the endless cycles of big, bad government programs to federalize preschool and daycare.

On Wednesday, the White House Summit on Early Education will unveil nearly $1 billion in new "investments" to "expand access to high-quality early childhood education to every child in America" from "birth and continuing to age 5." It's a retread of President Obama's 2013 State of the Union school-spending plan, which was a repackaging of his 2011 Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge program.

Those Obama initiatives are knockoffs of moldy-old Democratic policy chestnuts, such as former Vice President Al Gore's push to fund preschool for all 3-year-olds at a cost to taxpayers of at least $50 billion over 10 years, left-wing actor/director Rob Reiner's "I Am Your Child" campaign for universal preschool and child care, and Hillary Clinton's various "It Takes a Village" schemes to expand Head Start from womb to work. With age comes fiefdom.

How could anybody be against tax-subsidized Pre-K for all, you say? Let me count the ways.

Every one of these Big Babysitter boondoggles rests on "progressive" junk science. The Obama White House asserts that "studies show that for every dollar we invest in early childhood education, we see a rate of return of $7 or more." Balderdash. This discredited claim rests on results of the tiny Perry Preschool Project in Michigan, run at a cost of $19,000 per child more than a half-century ago, and a similar program in North Carolina called the Abecedarian Early Intervention Project.

As David Armor of the libertarian Cato Institute noted in a thorough review of the scientific literature this fall, the "groups studied were very small, they came from single communities several decades ago, and both programs were far more intensive than the programs being contemplated today."

More recent research by the Brookings Institution's Russ Whitehurst found that the vaunted academic benefits of full-time Pre-K in Georgia and Oklahoma "have had, at best, only small impacts on later academic achievement." In fact, Georgia elementary school students' test scores are mediocre, and Oklahoma test scores have been on the decline for the past decade. A 2010 Department of Health and Human Services report, which assessed approximately 5,000 3- and 4-year-olds who were randomly assigned to either a control group or a group that had access to the federal Head Start program, concluded that "at the end of kindergarten and first grade ... the Head Start children and the control group children were at the same level on many of the measures studied."

In 2012, government researchers reported "little evidence of systematic differences in children's elementary school experiences through 3rd grade, between children provided access to Head Start and their counterparts in the control group." The federal investments in early childhood programs keep ballooning, yet the educational impacts are dubious at best.

Then there's the alarming encroachment of data miners into the lives of parents and their young children. As I've reported previously, Common Core-aligned assessment systems such as Teaching Strategies Gold in Colorado and California's "Desired Results Developmental Profile" are stockpiling massive amounts of information on preschoolers' social, emotional, physical, language and cognitive development. The collection of data and accompanying assessment inevitably dictate the content in the classroom. TS Gold, which integrates its results into the vast network of statewide longitudinal data systems, raked in $30 million in federal Race to the Top subsidies in 2012. The latest round of Obama's "Preschool Development Grants" and "Early Head Start-Child Care Partnership Awards" require applicants to plug into this insatiable data machine, as well as "linking" and "partnering" with a plethora of other government programs.

After attending TS Gold training sessions last year, Cindee Will, principal of the James Irwin Charter Academy in Colorado Springs, calculated that compliance, not including taking and uploading photos of students as required, would soak up at least 16.5 hours of kindergarten class time per week or 640 hours a year of instruction in class. Test administration four times a year for an average of 25 students, she told me, would mean "150 hours per year or 2.5 months: one quarter of our time. And this equation is done with the knowledge that our K program is a half-day program!"

As you might imagine, the administrative and financial burdens on small, privately run part-time preschool programs would be even more onerous. Fatal. And exactly as planned.

Think Obamacare is bad? Well, welcome to TotCare. The goal of the educational central planners, you see, is the elimination of competition. The fact is that the vast majority of Pre-K kids are already happily enrolled in early childhood programs outside of Fed Ed's clutches. The "problem" isn't most families' lack of access to preschool. It's Washington's lack of access to your kids for their institutionalized warehousing, data mining and pedagogical propaganda schemes. The Nanny State's ceaseless quest for control keeps creepily rolling along.



TOPICS: Business/Economy; Constitution/Conservatism; Culture/Society; Government
KEYWORDS: arth; education; preschool
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1 posted on 12/09/2014 10:33:03 PM PST by bd476
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To: bd476

Communism: step one ... indoctrinate children at the earliest stages of life.


2 posted on 12/09/2014 10:39:58 PM PST by doc1019
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To: doc1019

Bingo!


3 posted on 12/09/2014 10:44:47 PM PST by Fungi
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To: doc1019

> Communism: step one ... indoctrinate children at the earliest stages of life.

Can’t see the Marxist leave fast enough. Payback is going to be a major
bit€h if it’s anything near the amount of pain he’s inflicted upon us....


4 posted on 12/09/2014 10:47:28 PM PST by jsanders2001
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To: jsanders2001

?


5 posted on 12/09/2014 10:49:42 PM PST by doc1019
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To: bd476

Boner and McTurtle will fund it.


6 posted on 12/09/2014 10:50:28 PM PST by Uncle Miltie ('The HERO of the (0bamacare) story is Mitt Romney' - "Stupid" Jonathan Gruber)
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To: bd476

We need to get the Feds out of Education. We should have never let their nose under the tent.


7 posted on 12/09/2014 11:23:10 PM PST by Veggie Todd (The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. TJ)
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To: metmom

Early, early morning Ping :)


8 posted on 12/10/2014 12:02:40 AM PST by upchuck (Ferguson: Put your hands down and go to work!)
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To: bd476

Disney had it right and produced this film.
However YouTube has “pulled” it because your to stupid to understand. Keep an eye open for it to show up again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scxS9pAv9ps


9 posted on 12/10/2014 12:06:52 AM PST by MtnMan101
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To: bd476; 2Jedismom; 6amgelsmama; AAABEST; aberaussie; AccountantMom; Aggie Mama; agrace; ...

ANOTHER REASON TO HOMESCHOOL

This ping list is for the “other” articles of interest to homeschoolers about education and public school. This can occasionally be a fairly high volume list. Articles pinged to the Another Reason to Homeschool List will be given the keyword of ARTH. (If I remember. If I forget, please feel free to add it yourself)

The main Homeschool Ping List handles the homeschool-specific articles. I hold both the Homeschool Ping List and the Another Reason to Homeschool Ping list. Please freepmail me to let me know if you would like to be added to or removed from either list, or both.

10 posted on 12/10/2014 12:22:27 AM PST by metmom (...fixing our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faith...)
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To: doc1019

>>Communism: step one ... indoctrinate children at the earliest stages of life.<<

Communism step 0: Make women think that raising their own children is wrong.


11 posted on 12/10/2014 12:26:41 AM PST by freedumb2003 (AGW: Settled Science? If so, there would only be one model and it would agree with measurements)
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To: bd476

I hate to think what the gov’t will decide is necessary information for preschoolers.


12 posted on 12/10/2014 1:08:21 AM PST by The Ghost of FReepers Past (Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light..... Isaiah 5:20)
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To: bd476

Pre-schoolers are taught to sing the Obama Song!


13 posted on 12/10/2014 1:26:48 AM PST by Candor7 (Obama fascism article:(http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/barack_obama_the_quintessentia_1.html))
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To: The Ghost of FReepers Past

What they are teaching is secondary; the idea is to get more unionized teachers on the payroll (to funnel taxpayer funds directly to their political arm, the Democratic Party). In the same manner that Romney wrote off 47% of the voters, and Republican candidate for office is running against a huge campaign warchest supplied by the local commissars (the teachers’ unions).


14 posted on 12/10/2014 2:32:06 AM PST by kearnyirish2 (Affirmative action is economic warfare against white males (and therefore white families).)
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To: bd476

Quote to concerned parents in 1936.....”We have the children 10 hours a day; what are you?” ..... Adolph Hitler


15 posted on 12/10/2014 2:54:45 AM PST by high info voter
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To: bd476

The Soviet Union has invaded through the US political and electoral programs! Who would have ever thought!?!?!?!?

16 posted on 12/10/2014 3:07:33 AM PST by BCW (ARMIS EXPOSCERE PACEM)
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To: MtnMan101

Is this it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l14WDZCnz-w


17 posted on 12/10/2014 3:08:34 AM PST by BCW (ARMIS EXPOSCERE PACEM)
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To: BCW

Thanks for that.


18 posted on 12/10/2014 3:26:24 AM PST by Excellence (Marine mom since April 11, 2014)
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To: bd476

high-quality early childhood education to every child in America” from “birth and continuing to age 5.”

I don’t even know what that means. Cleaner sand in the sandbox?

They like that term “high quality”...but its meaningless blather for their stupid voter base,,,,unfortunately it works.AND it sort of shuts down any discussion: how can you be against high quality anything, you knuckle-dragging haters?


19 posted on 12/10/2014 3:31:58 AM PST by Adder (No, Mr. Franklin, we could NOT keep it.)
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To: high info voter
high info voter wrote: "Quote to concerned parents in 1936.....'We have the children 10 hours a day; what are you?' ..... Adolph Hitler

There's a similarity to what is heard from teachers unions' today.

20 posted on 12/10/2014 4:01:00 AM PST by bd476
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